Wanted: convert Firefox tabs to links

I try to be sparing with installing Firefox extensions. It’s easy to get install-crazy and the next time you look, FF isn’t stable and you’re not 100% sure why. But here’s something that I totally want: an extension that converts my currently-open tabs to a list of links.

Why? Well, I have weekend-full-tab-itis. I’ve been reading my Google Reader feeds and surfing this week, and now it’s Saturday morning. Lots happened this past week, and I’d enjoy talking about several of these topics, but it’s a hassle to convert them into links. Here’s what my currently-opened tabs looked like this morning:

As you can see, there’s a lot of good stuff there, but it would take forever to craft those links by hand. Anybody know of a tiny, robust Firefox extension that does this? Ideally, it would even allow a blacklist of domains not to convert into tabs. For example, I almost always have Gmail and Google Calendar open, but I don’t need those converted into links because typically I don’t want to blog about them.

Anyone know of a small extension that does this?

Update: One of my favorite extensions is MakeLink, by Rory Parle. I wonder if it might be possible to convince Rory to add a “Make all tabs into links” option into MakeLink? I guess it never hurts to ask. 🙂

Update: Wow, Rory stopped by in record time — thanks, and I heartily recommend MakeLink! It turns out that there’s a delightful extension to do exactly what I want called CopyAllUrls (thanks for mentioning this, AdamM). With a right-click, you can save all your tabs to the clipboard in a very flexible format. I wanted multiple lines that look like this:

To get that format of “tab to html” output, I tweaked the output options of the extension slightly. Here’s the settings I used to export tabs in the format that I wanted:

I clicked the “Copy only url” option and unselected the “Line break between entries” and “Copy tab history” options. Finally I set the actual format of the urls here:

I selected HTML markup and checked the box to use my own custom mark-up. For the url itself, you can do any format and there are variables you can use (smart, very smart). So I entered <a href=”$url”>$title</a> for my markup format. It only took a few seconds, and now when I’ve got too many tabs, I can copy all my tabs in a nice format that’s ready to paste into a WordPress textarea box. Nice. 🙂

Things like this are why I love the Firefox community so much. It makes me want to go donate moolah to people who write extensions. I just did for Jürgen R. Plasser for the CopyAllUrls add-on. I went looking for a donation link on Rory’s site for MakeLink and just now saw that he’s joining Google soon. Sweet! I’ll wait until Rory’s on-board in a few weeks; there are ways to show appreciation to fellow Googlers. 🙂

How about a simple, non-extension (not as automated, but not as time-consuming) solution? Bookmark all tabs, then export the bookmarks as a HTML file. Problem is that exports ALL your bookmarks, and they’re not exactly a clean set of links… mmm. Seems like an extension would be a much easier and complete solution, ignore me!

I’m not big on Firefox extensions either but what I’ve found useful is to use the Google Bookmarks button on Google Toolbar and click on “Bookmark all tabs”. This will store them all in one location that you’ll be able to retrieve at a later time… even put them on your personalized homepage.

I’ve had quite a few requests for new features for Make Link in the last few days. I’ve made a few updates, and I expect to add a few more features soon. I’ll keep this post in mind and see if there’s a logical way to implement it without over-complicating what should be a simple extension for other users.

If you right click on the tab in FF you get an option to create a bookmark of all the tabs open. Of course if you are like me, you end up with 100 bookmarks and can’t find the source you wanted with all of them. Sigh.

Thanks for the tip, AdamM + Matt! I always relied on Firefox to restore my last session after shooting it down :). It works, but is not quite as elegant. Hey, I finally learned something new on this blog 😀

JohnMu, I often do that too (killing FF after a few days to reclaim that memory). In fact, that’s a great way to install extensions while preserving your open tabs. But it’s nice to be able to dump them as well.

Matt, I’m actually a regular reader here. I was surprised enough to see Make Link mentioned in one of my blog subscriptions earlier in the week; I’m downright flabbergasted that it’s happened a second time!

I had thought of putting a Paypal link on the Make Link page on my site, but I have never got around to it. I think I’m happier just giving that little bit back to the Firefox community. I’ve got a lot more out of it than I’ve put in.

You could just right click the RSS folder and click Open In Tabs, and for each tab hit ALT-D to go to the address bar and CTRL-C to copy the URL to the clipboard. Then just paste it wherever. Wouldn’t be terribly time consuming, though that wouldn’t capture the name of the page.

Matt, you’re fishing for a browser-war thread there aren’t you! I know 😉

Cast-aside the tired old arguments and give it a blast – Yes, it’s built *on* IE’s engine but that’s not the same as saying it “suffers” IE. It really is awesome (and I speak from the perspective of having “them” all installed, to compare.).

… and just wait ’till v2.0 rolls-out: Drag window to split-screen; built-in screen-capture (full-page or regional etc…), couple both those with the Blogdex plug-in (a WYSIWIG blog-writer/poster), and you have an excellent powertool for bloggers (the writer on one side, web-page t’other).

Hi Matt,
I just installed the “Copy All URLs” extension and it works great. Now I can coyp the URLs of the as many tabs now and even store them in a file. Thanks for sharing. 🙂 BTW, is there a limit as to the no. of tabs that can be copied at a time.
Regards,
Anand